Dadaism was an art movement born out of the horrors of the first world war. As a movement it had strong anti-war politics and was anti-bourgeois. It rejected logic and welcomed the irrational. It was the beginning of abstract art and laid the groundwork for movements like surrealism and postmodernism.
In photography this rejection of reason and logic manifested itself in the use of the photomontage. We can see this at play in the work of Hannah Hock. Her image Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany focuses on Dada's dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic. We can see various slogans in the image like 'Anti-Dada movement' pasted over portraits of Wilhelm II.
In essence Dada in photography introduced artists that were anti-pictorialist. In Europe these photographers saw photography as a cultural force and viewed it as socially progressive. Fine art was being replaced by an art based on popular culture. Art was to be for the proletariat and would become a force for social change.
(C) Hannah Hock
Hock was particularly focused on the role of women in society and the method of cutting out images with a scissors to make an image provided a link to the domestic realm.
In this image we can see that women have a role to play. The image hints at women's suffrage and their domestic situation. She contrasts traditional domesticity with images of progressive women like actresses and poets.
Other photographers that were influenced by the Dada movement include Man Ray, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky.
If we look at Lissitzky's famous photomontage The Constructor we see an image from his self portrait series. It is a modernist statement. He produces a collage of future man using his head, hands and other instruments like a compass. There compass has drawn a circle which acts like a halo for this prophet.
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